An inventory availability tracking system is typically an important component of a merchant site. As used in the present disclosure, the term “merchant site” may refer to an e-commerce site, an m-commerce site, a store kiosk, a social networking merchant front end, a customer service software application, or other types of sales operations. Generally, an inventory management system may include functionality to track current inventory levels of one or more products offered for sale at various levels of a merchant's sales structure. Such products may include products in a merchant's owned inventory, drop ship vendor inventory, liquidation marketplace inventory, aggregated store inventories, or other product inventories. Overselling or underselling are undesirable scenarios that could occur in cases where inventory availability tracking in a merchant database is unclear or unreliable.
Updating an item inventory at one or more front end servers on a real-time basis may be a resource-intensive process as it typically may involve: a complex backend algorithm to determine the accurate availability and delivery date of an item in a most optimal and expedited fashion; network delays (from the web/app server to back end systems and/or databases); additional access restrictions like authentication and authorization processes, protocol termination, acceleration, encryption, and decryption; and raw data access and additional processing.
Fast page creation and delivery to consumers may be important because as page load times increase, consumers may be increasingly more likely to abandon the page. Accordingly, slow page loading times on a merchant site may directly decrease overall sales and profitability.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding components throughout the several views of the drawings. Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present disclosure. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present disclosure.